Teaching Bioethics to a Large Number of Biology and Pharma Students: Lessons Learned

Abstract

To be made aware of bioethical issues related to their disciplines, undergraduate students in biology and pharmaceutical sciences at the University of Basel are required to enroll in the bioethics course called “Introduction to Bioethics”. This article describes the chances and challenges faced when teaching a large number of undergraduate biology and pharmaceutical sciences students. Attention is drawn to the relevance and specific ethical issues that biology and pharmaceutical sciences students may be confronted with and to how these could be integrated into ethics curricula. Results from a survey addressing the knowledge and opinion of students taking the course in spring semester 2012, 2013, and 2014 are presented and discussed. Finally, we describe the lessons learned and how we have improved the course based on students’ feedback throughout the following years.

Keywords:

• bioethics
• biology
• course implementation
• higher education
• pharmaceutical sciences

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank Yolande Schild and Monica Stancu for their help with entering the data into SPSS.